Friday, May 22, 2009

In this Blogger tutorial I will show you the best way to add meta tags to your Blogger blog (Blogspot blog) to improve the SEO of your blog and work around the limitations of the Blogger platform.

I have observed that there are many Blogger help blogs out there telling you to just add meta tags however this will very likely achieve the opposite result from the one you are after. Whether you are yet to add meta tags or you have added meta tags already make sure you read and follow the methods contained in this article to get the best results.

What are Meta Tags?Meta tags are HTML tags that provide additional information about your blog that is unseen by visitors but available to search engines. The meta description tag, for example, provides a short summary of the page content. The keyword meta tags show the keywords and keyword phrases a visitor might use to find your blog. Because of abuse of meta tags search engines have become smarter and most no longer place emphasis on keywords to establish page ranking however keyword meta tags are still used by some search engines so it is a good idea to include them.

Limitations of Blogger and SEOOne of the disappointing aspects of Blogger is that it is not properly optimized for SEO. Meta descriptions and keywords are not supported by blogger.com by default. Title tags are also not optimized. This means that you will miss valuable opportunities to attract visitors to your blog.

However meta tags and meta descriptions can be inserted into your Blogger template (Blogspot template) to good effect. Fortunately these work arounds will go a long way to improving the placement of your blog in search engine results. Please refer to adjust Blogger title tags for improved SEO for help with title tags.

Simply placing a meta tag description in your Blogger template is problematic because Blogger will use the same meta tags for all pages in your blog. This means that every entry that Google has for your site will show in search results with the same description. This solution would result in reduced traffic rather than increased traffic. However there is a way to add meta tags to the home page of your blog only which will not affect post pages in your blog. In this way visitors will find the home page of your blog in search engines by the use of appropriate keywords and a site description.

How to Add Meta Tags to a Blogger Blogspot Blog Home Page1. Login to Blogger if not already logged in

2. Navigate to Design > Edit HTML

3. Back up your template as a precaution by downloading full template to your computer.

10. To see your description in action you can either navigate to your blog's home page and click on view source in your browser. In Internet Explorer you will find this option in the view menu. A text document will appear which you can scroll through. You will see your description near the top of the document. Alternatively you can check your description in a free Meta Tag Analyzer tool such as Submit Express or SEO Centro

How to Add Meta Tags to a Blogger Blogspot Blog Individual Post1. Follow steps 1 to 4 as for adding meta tags to the Home Page

2. Add the following in the <head> section of your Blogger template. Enter this code below the Home Page code above you have just entered:

3. Add your post URL, keywords and description. To find the URL of your post navigate to the post's page and copy the link showing in the address bar of your browser including the http:// prefix

4. Click on the Save Template button

5. To check your description you can use the view source in your browser once you have navigated to the post page or a meta tag analyzer

Note: This method is suitable if you have a few key posts that you want to ensure you get maximum traffic on. If you have a lot of posts this manual method would be very tedious. I don't know of any automated method or script to add meta tags at this point but I am investigating it and will keep you posted.

Analyze Your Blogspot Blogger Meta TagsOnce you have added meta tags to your blog you can use tools to analyze them to ensure their relevance. Aim for meta tag relevancy to page content of above 90%. To check this you can use a free meta tag analyzer tool such as Submit Express or SEO Centro

Troubleshooting and Tips

Observe Character LimitsTo avoid problems ensure that you keep within the maximum character limits:

Title Tag TweakIf you have inserted the title tag tweak and it is highly recommended that you do so then you will need to add the code above after the title tag adjustment in the &lthead&gt section of your template. Read more about adjusting title tags

KeywordsAlthough some search engines no longer place too much emphasis on keywords some still do so it is worth adding keywords. Avoid using the same keyword more than 3 times. The maximum number of keywords recommended to be robot friendly is around 20.

In this Blogger meta tag tutorial I have discussed the best way to add meta tags to a Blogger blog (Blogspot blog) to improve search engine results given the limitations of the Blogger platform. In this article you have learned to add both meta tags for keywords and descriptions to the home page. You have also learned how to add meta tags to an individual post. To optimize your meta tags I have included links to free meta tag analyzer tools.

Hi Cascia. I have had a good look at your template and even downloaded it to make sure it is working Ok. No problem on a clean install with both title tags and meta tags. I see you have added keywords to your template so I am wondering if your problem is partially fixed. Sing out if it is not. I will email this to you as well.

Thank you so much for this and other tips. I added the meta tag, went to the site you mentioned and tweaked the keywords and description, and DELETED the blog description per Blogger. I did it in early June, and I'm seeing a significant jump in the page impression number.

Arevamirpal thanks for letting me know about the success of your blog since installing metatags. I had a marked jump in traffic too plus it helped make some articles surface rather than languish in the background

I know this is not the right post to ask, but do you know how to allow readers to print the post only (without two side bars that I have and header)? Some of my posts are long, and if my readers are like me in any way, they may rather print and read. So, what I would like to do is to change HTML code so that Print Preview will show only the post, and to create a "print the post" button either at the beginning or at the end of each post.

Your various suggestions have been all good and all worked at the first try with no problem, so I rather trust yours than any other blog help site. Hope you could help. My site address is ex-skf.blogspot.com.

Blogging has come to the point where my mother actually heard of it. That means that it is not only popular but becoming somewhat mainstream. As a result, people are really starting to voice their opinions by blogging and commenting on blogs. Voicing opinion is one thing, but when it comes to commenting there is a very useful side effect. Commenting can help increase your website's rankings on certain search engines.

Blogging is a fantastic forum for people to share their opinion (positive or negative), tell of their own experience or have a good old gripe session. It seems like some search engines reward a blog that has a fairly active comments section. Provided there is no abuse I think this is a good thing as active comments are one important indicator about how well you are doing at engaging your audience.

arevamirpal what great feedback to hear that you have found my suggestions good and value my opinion. Trust is a great thing! I think I do know a way to do what you are asking and it has actually sparked an idea for a post. Will get cracking on this asap.

I received this error message:Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.XML error message: The reference to entity "ltb:if" must end with the ';' delimiter.What did I do wrong?Thanks

Old Guy what browser are you using please? Looks like the code is parsed but it doesn't need to be parsed. I am wondering if your browser is reading the parsed code in my article. Please come back to me as this shouldn't be happening. If necessary I can email you the code

Great post. I've already added my blog to Google as per your advice and I was moving on to trying to add metadata to my blog. I'm having some difficulties with blogger telling me that I need to add end tags to close off (I assume) the 'meta content='...'' tags when I copy the code directly into my template. Thoughts?

Will some browsers do not display the code correctly. I have just tweaked it a little to try and compensate for this. If this doesn't help leave me your email address and I will email the code directly to you.

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.XML error message: Element type "meta" must be followed by either attribute specifications, ">" or "/>".

That's what i encountered when I'm adding metatags for individual posts. What will I do? I'm pretty much sure that my tags are closed.

Hi, when I take a look at View Source for the POST-specific meta tags, they don't seem to show. The HOME meta tags are there..Could I be doing something wrong? This is the specific post:http://how2bfree.blogspot.com/2009/07/ilearningglobaltv.htmlThanks..

Ajdin I took a look at the source of your post and as you say the meta tags aren't there. For meta tags to work on post pages you need to have them within an if statement that points to specific post they relate to. Not sure if you have done this. See my instructions for meta tags for individual posts. If you are still having problems come back to me as I could take a look at your template.

Wow. This has to be the easiest way I have ever read for adding Meta tags. I can fix pc's and laptops with my eyes shut but could not figure out how to add this to my blog. Thanks so much for the detail you put in this blog.

OK, so I do understand this and how to do it. Just added general meta tags for my whole blogs. But it looks like if you want to add them for every post that eventually your template HTML code would get very long. Would this slow down the load time for the blog? Would it be a better idea to just add meta data for some of the key individual posts? Very useful post here!

Hi Sharkbytes. Setting up meta tags for each individual post is a bit of a hassle but I don't know of a way round this although I am looking into it. I think that if your blog has lots of posts this could be very tedious and yes will eventually slow loading a little. As you suggested as long as you make sure your key posts or those less likely to be found otherwise have meta tags you are on the road to getting good traffic.

Hi ferradyse, I couldn't check out your blog because I got the following message "under review due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations".

This code has no additions so will not be responsible for the spam. What you include in the tags however may be attracting spammers. Looks like you need to take a good look at your blog since Blogger has put it under review for possible content violations

Stanley you can add the details of every post you have made if you have the energy to do that. Or alternatively just add meta tags to the main index page. Follow the instructions for individual posts for the greatest control over your posts. The search engine will crawl your blog and update the description

I can see that you yourself have not used this method of editing meta tags for your blog blogknowhow.blogspot.com. Why is that? When it is so useful & important why haven't you used it to optimize keywords & rankings?

Hi Faizy. You are correct that I don't use this method for every article on Blog Know How. To be honest I just don't have the time to implement. What I have done though is selectively choose some key articles and given them a boost by creating meta tags for the post page (surrounded by an <if> statement of course). Also I have meta tags for my blog main page so that search engines display what I have crafted rather than what they choose for any links to my home page. Happy blogging!

The meta tags on the pages of your website are important SEO elements that you should pay close attention to. These meta tags are your first line of communication with search robots and the quality of your tags will help your website's search engine ranking a lot.

Blogging is a fantastic forum for people to share their opinion (positive or negative), tell of their own experience or have a good old gripe session. It seems like some search engines reward a blog that has a fairly active comments section. Provided there is no abuse I think this is a good thing as active comments are one important indicator about how well you are doing at engaging your audience.

Thanks for the tips, very useful. I was wondering if you could tell me why different meta tag checkers say different things? While one says I have both a description and keywords, others won't find the description, or anything at all! Is this likely to be a fault on my behalf?

Green Kermit I just checked and you are right about the meta tag analyzers displaying different results. Nothing you have done if you have followed the instructions. Try entering meta tag analyzer in Google search and you will come up with many different variations. Use them as a guide only. Thanks for your query.